Moros
by Alexandra Spar
Summary: Set in the Crash and Burn story arc. When a Learjet crashes outside the estate one winter night, old secrets are revealed that threaten everything the team has worked for. Can a figure from Devon's past stop the danger that threatens their future? (UNFINI


DISCLAIMER: Knight Rider is the property of Glen A 

DISCLAIMER: Knight Rider is the property of Glen A. Larson, no infringement is intended and no money is being made. Robert Frost is also not mine. Moros is the Greek god of destiny, the puppet-master. This story is set in my Crash and Burn universe; to understand the Chris-Karr-Henry thing and my version of the links, go read that first. Again, Gryph and elfin are responsible for most of the creative updates to the Knight Rider universe and it is largely due to them that these stories exist, and they haven't killed me yet. Go read their stories, too, they're a great deal better than mine. 

It is dark, and yet it is not entirely dark; twin beams of brilliance reveal a swirling universe of snow, silent and almost comforting in its softness. The night is soundless with that peculiar muffled quality that comes with heavy snowfall. Almost soundless.

"Whose woods these are I think I know; 

his house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow....

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

The darkest evening of the year...

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake

......The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep...."

"And an entirely overblown sense of poetic appropriateness. I'm cold."

"Damn. I never could remember the rest of that poem."

"Christine," Henry said meaningfully, "it's not getting any warmer."

"Oh, hush, little horse," she said, but she lit the Mustang's engine again and eased them forward into the whirling snow. "You've been through worse."

"'Little'?" Henry exclaimed. "Little, my exhaust manifold. Look who's talking."

"Hey, I'm as tall as Alexander the Great was," she retorted. "Besides, Frost was using 'little' in an endearing sort of way. Jesus, it's cold."

"You do have an enchanting way of stating the obvious," Henry said, without rancor. "I'm reading fifteen degrees Fahrenheit exterior."

Chris winced. It was almost never this cold in California. Not even in the bad years. This was ghost weather, and this was perhaps not the best place to be on what was indeed the darkest evening of the year, or at least the shortest day. Never mind. Only a few more miles, and they would be safe home. She glanced absently over Henry's dials and gauges, making sure all the sensitive systems were still functioning despite the cold. "You feeling okay?" she murmured, stroking the wheel.

"I've been better," he said. "Core temperature's holding steady, though. Nothing to worry about."

She nodded, returned her attention to the softly mounded road ahead, the whirling whiteness lit by Henry's headlamps. They were moving slowly, carefully, despite Henry's superior traction; both sides of this road sloped off fairly steeply, and she was not going to try anything stupid in weather like this. The dark-red Mustang crept steadily onwards in third gear, the low thunder of the V-10 almost completely deadened by the snow.

Christine's entire attention was focused on the road ahead, and she was almost hypnotized by the swirling patterns of the snow against the blackness of the night; so it was that she didn't notice the figure by the roadside until it moved, staggering into the brilliant arcs of Henry's duals. She gasped, braking suddenly; the Mustang only skidded a few feet before she regained control and brought them to a halt.

It was a woman. She stood swaying in the surgical glow of the headlights, so muffled in dark clothing Christine could hardly tell the gender; but as the figure half-collapsed on the smooth curve of Henry's hood, the collar of her heavy coat slipped down, and Chris saw her face.

"My God," she said. "Henry. Is she....?"

"She's hypothermic," the AI said quickly. "Get her inside. I don't know how long she's been out here; she didn't register on my scanners, but the snow's screwing with my instruments anyway."

She cracked the driver's side door and got out, shivering in the sudden icy wind. The girl hadn't moved from where she leaned on the hood, and she didn't look up as Chris took her arm. "Can you hear me?" she asked.

The stranger groaned, faintly. Chris flicked an uneasy glance around, wondering who she was and why she was out here all alone. She was wearing what appeared to be fairly expensive clothing. 

She sighed. No time for queries. Henry could protect her, if the girl turned out to be dangerous; not, she thought, that she seemed in any condition to present danger. She got the stranger's arm around her shoulders and supported her round to the passenger side, eased her into Henry's warm cabin, and got in herself. "What the hell," she said aloud, staring at the girl in the greenish light from the instrument panel. 

"I don't recognize the biorhythm," Henry said. "She does look familiar, doesn't she."

"Terribly." Chris reached over, smoothed the girl's dark hair away from her face. Quite unreasonably beautiful, she lay limply back against the leather upholstery, her eyes closed. She was almost sure she'd seen her before.

She was greyish-white with cold, and her breathing came uneasily, rattling like dead leaves in her chest. Chris felt for a pulse in her alabaster throat; her heart beat slowly, deeply, but it was there. "We've got to take her to the mansion," she said aloud.

"Yes," said Henry. There was something in the AI's voice she didn't much like; he sounded exhausted, and more than a little pained. Hurriedly she slipped him back into gear and moved off again, doubly aware of the urgency. The mansion wasn't far now. Just over the next rise and along a driveway. They'd be all right. 

The lights of the Knight complex were just visible in the distance when Henry suddenly began to cough. The great V-10 engine was running unevenly, chopping as if something was stuck in Henry's dual carbs. Christine frowned. "Henry, what's wrong?"

"Nothing," Henry gasped. "Just cold."

Chris, biting her lip, downshifted; the engine smoothed a little, but it still sounded like hell. Beside her the stranger moaned and shifted in the seat, tossing her head from side to side. Her face and throat were sheened with sweat. 

_Jesus_, Chris thought, _she looks awful. Got to get her someplace warm._

The Mustang struggled up the last hill, came in sight of the mansion. Chris pulled up in front of the great doors and cut Henry's engine, got out and ran up the steps. The tension of the last few miles was hitting her in great nauseous waves.

"Devon!" she yelled. "Michael! Someone! Come quickly!"

Running footsteps sounded in the foyer, and the boxwood doors creaked open to reveal Jack Lorne and Michael Knight, looking concerned and not a little sleepy. Chris realized belatedly that it was after midnight.

"I picked up a stranger just down the road," she said, her teeth chattering. "She's hypothermic. And Henry's not well. Is Bonnie up?"

"I am now," Bonnie yawned, coming up behind the two men. "Move, both of you. It's freezing out there."

Her words seemed to break the paralysis holding Michael and Jack, who pushed past Chris and down the steps to where Henry sat in the drifting snow. Bonnie followed them, with Chris; together, they carried her strange hitchhiker into the warm safety of the mansion. Bonnie turned to Chris. "What's going on?"

"God only knows. She just sort of appeared out of nowhere and collapsed in front of us. She looks so familiar, but I don't remember where I've seen her before...."

"Well, don't just stand there," Bonnie yawned. "What's wrong with Henry?"

"He didn't seem to be feeling well, and his engine just started knocking like hell on the way up to the house. He says it's the cold, but I don't know."

Bonnie raised an eyebrow at her. "Didn't you and Justin just do a complete winterization on him?"

"Yeah, two weeks ago." Chris shrugged. "Man, I'm freezing. Let's get inside and have a look at him before we all die of cold."

"Record low temperatures were reported last night all over the broadcast area, ranging from minus two degrees in the mountains to twenty degrees in downtown Las Vegas. Heavy snowfall is still continuing, measured at seven inches this morning at Barstow and three in Vegas. No report as yet to how this may be affecting holiday travel; we'll keep you posted as the news develops. There have been a number of water main breakages, affecting mainly the area around the state line. No fatalities were reported for last night's low temperature-----" Devon flicked off the TV in his office, leaning back in the leather chair. His eyes were heavily circled, his hands shaking ever so faintly. Beside him, a brandy decanter and an empty glass bore witness to a very long night. 

The girl Christine had picked up on the road outside the estate was still unconscious. Devon had ordered that she be kept under strict medical observation and that he be notified the instant she awoke, but had not explained to the rest of them why exactly she was so important. He thought he would keep that information to himself for the time being, especially as everybody was already worried over Henry.

Which was another thing he didn't feel like explaining right now. 

He had managed to pass off the unexpected failure of all the medical computers upstairs as a function of selective power loss to the house, but he was not sure how he was going to explain Henry's condition, or what exactly they could do about it. Presumably it was reversible, but until Katherine woke up they'd have no way of knowing.

He poured another slug of brandy into his glass.

_"Mr. Miles, I'm sorry to have to inform you that her injuries appear to be fatal...."_

"Mr. Miles, I'm dreadfully sorry, but she has entered a terminal crisis..."

"Mr. Miles, I'm sorry to say there's nothing more we can do...."

And then the young doctor's desperate struggle to explain to him what was then an experimental procedure, with no time to waste, no time to explain anything more than was enough to get him to sign the forms, and then they wheeled her away into the green-tiled room again. He would not see her for almost a year. They told him she had died on the table.

Oh, Kate. Oh God, Kate.

He had been so glad Margaret had not lived to see that day; to see her little girl lying bloody and mangled amid the stacks and columns of beeping equipment, tubes running into her arms, her nose, her eyelids so thin they could see the darkness of her blue eyes beneath them. Margaret had been a lover of beauty, and Katie had been lovely. Before. She was lovely now, but it was not the same beauty Devon remembered; not the same face. Not quite.

"Mr. Miles, I'm so sorry to have to tell you....we lost her."

Devon filled the glass once more, tossed it down. Kate could do more damage here than a small nuclear warhead, and there was very little he could do besides sit and watch.

Bonnie and Christine, hollow-eyed, were still working on Henry. Since the night before, neither of them had slept, nor eaten anything except donuts cadged off the security guards, seasoned with the vintage tang of motor oil from greasy fingers. Bonnie's diagnostic laptops weren't working reliably, for some reason, and they'd had to do everything the hard way. Nothing seemed physically wrong with the engine, and while Chris busied herself cleaning out the already-clean fuel system, Bonnie ran what checks she could on Henry's CPU. He was being unusually quiet, which Chris took to mean he was still feeling ill. Neither Jack nor Michael had come to inquire what was up, but the women were too busy worrying about Henry to start worrying about the organic members of the organization.

Bonnie disconnected her perceptor-checking handset, subsided onto a workbench pulled up beside Henry's nose. "I don't know what else I can do," she said, quietly. "Henry, can you tell us any more about what's wrong?"

The Mustang was silent for a long time. "Not really," he said. "None of my circuits are damaged from any outside influence, exactly. It's more as if some sort of....blanket....is blocking me from running smoothly. I suppose it's like a PC having too many programs open at once. It was difficult for me to keep the injection ratio of the engine steady, which is why it was knocking like hell coming up the hill. All of this started fairly suddenly."

Chris put down her spanner. "Oh, honey," she said, her voice soft and aching with sympathy, "is there anything we can do to help?"

"Yeah," said Henry, "you can get some sleep. Both of you. This isn't a mechanical failure, and none of my self-diagnostics are picking up anything badly wrong with the circuitry. Whatever is wrong will keep until you're both rested."

Inside Chris's mind, she felt the neuro link with Henry stir. They'd kept it low-grade for the past few weeks while they worked on assignment, and she hadn't felt anything when Henry started complaining of malaise; but now, as they both approached exhaustion, the link's blocks began to degrade. She felt traces of what Henry felt; it reminded her strongly of the few times she'd been under anesthesia; there was a stage when one was neither asleep nor awake, unable to really exist in either world. Over the link she sent Henry a wave of warm sympathy and comfort, and felt the presence of her partner grow slightly stronger.

_We'll find out what it is,_ she told him. _We'll find it, and we'll fix it._

I know. Henry's confidence in her was like a bright light. _Go to bed, Chris, you're exhausted. _

_Are you going to be all right?_

Of course, Henry told her. _Whatever this is, it's not life-threatening. Just annoying. Go away and go to bed._

_Yessir_, she sent. "Bonnie, he's right. We're not achieving much. Let's go get some sleep and have another go when we're thinking straight."

"I hate to admit it, but you're right," the computer mech said, rubbing her eyes. "Henry, I'm seeing two of you. We'll come back in a few hours, okay?"

"Go," the AI said, amused. Leaning on each other, Bonnie and Chris left the garage, closing and locking the door. Neither had forgotten the vicious attack on Karr when he had first returned of his own volition, nearly a year ago; neither wanted to go through that particular hell again.

"D'you tell anyone else about this?" Bonnie asked Chris as they climbed the mansion's steps. The VEIL driver shook her blond head. 

"Naw, I've been in that garage since eight last night, same as you. Why?"

"I thought it might be wise to brief the other AIs on what's up. They're bound to be aware that Henry and you are back, and you haven't said hi to Karr, and, well, we all know where that's going." Bonnie yawned hugely. 

"True," said Chris. "What should I tell them? That Henry's a little under the weather and we haven't found what's wrong yet?"

"I trust your judgment," the brunette told her. "For all of me you can tell them the sky is falling. I'm going to bed."

Christine, grinning, pulled an about-face and headed back to the garage block. She punched in her key code, opening a larger garage door. It was more a hangar than a garage, but the two black cars parked amid drifts of equipment were roughly ten times more sophisticated than the B-3 bomber, so it was sort of apposite.

"Chris!" one of the cars said, flicking a red light at her. "It's good to see you. Where have you been?"

"Working my tail off, Kitt," she said, muffling a yawn. "How've you guys been dealing with my absence?"

"We survived," the other car drawled. His voice was almost half an octave lower than Kitt's, and darker; there was a silky cold edge to it that sent shivers down Chris's spine, as it had since their first meeting. "Somehow."

"Glad to hear it," she returned, approaching them. "Have you been outside at all?"

"Not since we last met," said Kitt. "Why?"

"It's absolutely beautiful. Up to your scanner in snow, and very sunny. Excellent Christmas weather."

"Ugh," Karr pronounced elegantly. "Snow. They salt the damn roads to melt it, and then you drive on the slush, and the salt gets stuck to your chassis and dissolves it. Not my thing."

Chris smiled, heartwrenchingly. "I missed you," she said, sitting down abruptly on the floor between the Trans Ams. "Both of you. Look, Henry's not very well, and that's what I've been working on for the past twenty-four hours. Bonnie thought you might be wondering what had become of us, and delegated me to go and tell you."

"What's wrong?" Kitt wanted to know.

"We don't know yet. It doesn't seem to be horribly serious, but he's not feeling great, and neither Bonnie nor I have been able to do anything for him. It doesn't help that all the stupid diagnostic laptops are on the fritz."

"They're all obsolete anyway," Karr put in. "We should get new ones." The acerbic tone of his voice told Christine he was worried about Henry, though he wouldn't admit it. 

"Yeah, well, tell Devon that. I have to go sleep somewhere or I'll fall over, but I wanted to come say hi and tell you what was up."

"Appreciate it," Karr said. "Come back when you're awake, okay? I'm suffering Chris withdrawal."

"It's a promise," she said, favoring the blue-black Trans Am with a brilliant, if faded, smile. Kitt sighed, flicking off his scanner.

"Sleep well, Chris. I hope Henry feels better."

"Yeah, so do I," she said, yawning, "I'm getting it over the link, and it feels like a mixture of flu and chloroform. See you guys."

"Damn," said Karr, after she was gone, "did you see the circles under her eyes?"

"Of course I did," his brother countered. "I haven't seen her that exhausted since.....well, since last time you got beat up. Christine is nothing if not dedicated."

"Mmmmm," Karr agreed. "I was thinking of playing ill so I could get some attention, but after seeing her so drained....I have to wonder what's wrong with Henry."

"It can't be anything mechanical," said Kitt, "or they'd have found it and fixed it. Twenty-four hours of straight work, and no improvement....."

"I didn't think there _was_ anything Chris and Bonnie couldn't fix, or at least identify," Karr mused. "What does Michael know about this?"

Kitt searched for his driver's presence. "Whatever he knows, he's not telling," he said. "He's asleep. There _is_ an unfamiliar biorhythm in the house, though," he added. "Vital signs indicative of sleep. Is it just me, or is there something extremely weird going on?"

"I think there may just be something extremely weird going on," Karr said levelly. "I'm going to go talk to Henry and find out what he's got to say about all this."

"Right. Maybe something happened last night that I didn't catch; I'll get into FLAGNet and see what the security cameras caught."

Karr fired his engine, shifted into reverse, activated a small controller that opened the connecting door to Henry's garage, and disappeared. Left alone, Kitt locked out the peripheral sensors and concentrated his energies on finding what the night before had brought with it.

__

Katherine Miles, surrounded by her entourage, reclined at her ease several hundred thousand feet above the earth's surface. The Learjet she had chartered was made possible in part by technological advances made by Knight Industries, to which she had never publicly announced her connection. She was flying to California now to continue her world tour, ignoring the presence of Knight in the southeastern sections of the state, after lengthy discussions with her advisors; nevertheless, as the plane reached for the sunset of the West Coast, she found herself wondering if it wouldn't be possible just to see him. Just for an hour or so. While she was there.

"Miss Miles?" One of the flight attendants was standing by her seat. "Complimentary champagne?"

"Thank you," said Katherine. It would be Dom Perignon, she knew, even without glancing at the label. Not that it made any difference. She couldn't really tell Texas Driver from Veuve Clicquot. The more expensive, the more seemly it was for her to consume. That credo explained the Learjet, the large DeBeers diamonds dripping from her ears and cascading around her throat, the Armani suit and Manolo Blahnik heels she wore, and the bevy of attendants with whom she was constantly surrounded. Money was, quite literally, an object in Katherine's life. Many objects. 

She gazed unseeing out of the window. Far below, the clouds inched slowly backwards, as they circled the globe. They should land at LAX within two hours, the pilot had announced deferentially, as if he would try and change that time if it did not suit her whim.

He probably would try, she thought absently. All of this was thoroughly amusing, in a vague and disconnected sort of way. It had been published about her that she was always bored, no matter what kind of distractions were presented for her attention; the papers had called her "eternal ennui" part of her beauty, part of what made people desire her so strongly; perhaps, she thought, they imagined they would be the one to surprise her. 

Nothing could really surprise her.

That was what was so amusing.

She drained the glass, setting it elegantly back on the tray table, leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes, which had been professionally lined and shadowed by Lancome makeup experts who travelled with her at all times. She knew that the attendant would come by to wake her before they landed; she also knew that she would wake up exactly one and a half hours from now. To the second.

Within another second, she was asleep.

Devon wasn't answering the phone in his office. Michael, stumbling downstairs in search of coffee, heard the phone ring four times in succession before wondering what was up and wandering across the hall into the office.

Devon wasn't there. The answering machine wasn't on, and the automatic call rerouting system was dark and silent. He picked up the handset, wondering what the hell had happened to his boss.

"Hello?"

"Devon Miles?"

"Uh, this is his office," said Michael, "may I take a message?"

"It's urgent that I speak with Miles immediately. This is the California State Police Department."

Jesus. "I'm not sure exactly where Mr. Miles is right now," Michael admitted. 

"Damn," said the Police Department. Michael suddenly recognized the voice.

"Lieutenant Brenner?" he asked. "Dave? It's Michael Knight."

"Jesus, Michael, you sounded just like a receptionist," Brenner said, relieved. "What the hell is going on over there? It took you ten rings to pick up."

"I just woke up," Michael said. "No sign of Devon. What's this all about?"

Brenner paused. "It's sort of personal. There was an accident last night."

Michael glanced over the desk, uncharacteristically messy, and caught sight of an empty brandy bottle that he knew for a fact had been full the day before. "I think maybe you'd better tell me everything."

The temperature hadn't risen above freezing, despite the midday sun on the brilliant snow. In the crystal sky, the pillar of smoke above the crash site was visible for miles; Michael knew there wasn't going to be any good news to convey when he found Devon. If he found Devon.

He signalled to the helicopter pilot to descend. White snow on pale desert sand made the ground look farther away than it was, and as they neared the wreckage Michael was amazed by the extent of the debris. For what must have been two miles in each direction, pieces of blackened fuselage and unidentifiable twisted metal strewed the desert; the main body of the Learjet had apparently broken in half, and the two pieces lay quite some distance from one another. He was vaguely surprised that someone hadn't got in touch with them earlier. The wreckage was less than twenty miles from the estate.

The phones might have been out, he thought absently. It was snowing like hell last night.

Which also must've hid some of the bits of the plane. If it crashed when Brenner said it did, the snowfall extended several hours after the crash. 

Jesus.

The copter touched down not far from where the police and NTSB vehicles were parked, and Michael jumped out and ran hunched over to where a clump of officials were standing in wait. "What the hell happened?" he shouted over the din of the rotor blades slowing.

"We don't know yet. Could be terrorists," Brenner yelled back. "Classified, of course."

"Have you found the passengers?"

Brenner gestured to a line of body bags lying in the snow beside one of the police jeeps. Michael counted. Five. "Is that everybody?"

"No," said someone else, shoving a cell phone back into his belt. "LaGuardia says there were six registered passengers on that flight, plus the four crew. We got three of the passengers and the two attendants: the other three and the pilots are still somewhere in that mess."

"No chance of survivors," Michael said, not questioning it. "Jesus, what a mess. What do I tell Devon?"

"That Katherine Miles hasn't been found yet," said Brenner, rubbing his temples. "We're doing our best to find them and to discover the cause of the crash. Still haven't got the black box."

Michael's communicator beeped. Excusing himself, he walked a few steps away and took the call.

"Where the hell are you?" Jack demanded. In the background Michael could hear the faint noises of the KI research and development complex.

"About twenty miles west of the estate," Michael said tiredly. "Is Devon there?"

"Yeah. He's passed out drunk on the floor. Get back here."

"On my way," said Michael tersely, trotting back to the copter. Devon _never_ got drunk. Never. That was like a goddamn priest smoking crack. He must already know.

_I never even knew he _had_ a daughter,_ Michael thought disjointedly, as they lifted off again. _Didn't know he was ever married._ _Christ._

Jack was waiting at the landing pad. "What the bloody hell is going on?"

"There was a plane crash last night. Devon's daughter was on it. They haven't found her body yet."

"Devon's daughter?" Jack repeated. "Oh. Oh Jesus. Well, that's worse news than mine." 

"Go on."

"Bonnie and Christine are both asleep, having been up since yesterday evening when Chris brought that girl in and got Bonnie to help her with Henry, who still feels like shit, and neither Karr nor Kitt have been able to figure out what's wrong. Added to which, none of the computers in the labs are working properly, and both Karr and Kitt are starting to feel bad. And Devon's probably killed half his brain cells with the amount of Salignac he took on. And the girl still hasn't woken up."

"Excellent," Michael groaned. "Any clue what to do?"

Jack extracted a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. "First I set fire to one of these, and then I internalize some caffeine, and then I try to stabilize Devon and figure out what's fucking with the computers."

"Got an extra?" Michael held out two fingers, and Jack inserted a Marlboro between them. "While you do that I'll go see what's up with Kitt and Karr. The link's sort of blocked. Is yours live?"

"No. But I'm not doing it. I suppose it's them trying to concentrate."

Upstairs in the equipment-crowded room, the slight form of the girl lay so still Jack thought she was dead at first; but he moved closer, seeing as he did her chest rise ever so slowly. None of the monitors were showing anything at all; one of the EKGs still had lights on, but its leads weren't attached to anything. Jack wondered if some horribly specific computer virus had attacked the estate.

Looking closer, he saw that her eyes were ever so slightly open, and breathed in sharply; at the sound, the eyelids flickered shut again. He frowned. "Can you hear me?"

Absolutely no response. He repeated the query, got no response, and gently raised one eyelid. There was no pupillary response whatsoever.

Jack fumbled at his belt and found his tiny flashlight hanging from his keys, shone the beam directly into the girl's eye; no response. Both pupils were equal, which was something to be glad of, and the eyes weren't bloodshot from any intracranial pressure. He played the light over her face, looking for he knew not what to explain the coma she seemed to be in.

She had had massive cosmetic surgery done, he saw. The scars were extremely well hidden, clearly done by an expert, but she had once looked completely different. The shape of her eyelids, the curve of her nose, the contour of her cheekbones, had all been altered. A bizarre idea struck him, and he lifted the eyelid again, shone the light on the eye, looking very closely at the curvature of the eyeball. He had thought he'd seen something on the surface of the eye, which on closer inspection turned out to be a tiny inscription at the edge of the iris, similar to that on some contact lenses: macrotica inc.

That wasn't on a contact lens. That was on the actual scleral surface of the eyeball.

"Hey," said someone behind him. He turned, found himself looking down at the FLAG doctor Devon had summoned for the girl. The doctor, looking rumpled, had clearly just woken up.

"Sorry, Doc. Notice there's no pupillary response?"

"What?" Sleep forgotten, the man took Jack's flashlight and bent over the girl. "My God. What's the blood pressure like?"

Jack sighed, took the cuff off its hook on the wall, and wrapped it around the girl's arm. "Here."

"Normal," said the doctor, confusedly. "I don't get it."

"Did you get the fact that she's got artificial eyeballs?"

"What?"

"Look closely. And give me back my flashlight. Don't you have something to look into peoples' eyes with?"

The doctor slapped feebly at his pockets, came up with an examining light, and handed Jack his keys. "What the hell is going on?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out," said Jack, turned, and ran down the stairs. Maybe Devon was conscious by now, and he could get some answers. 

Lieutenant David Brenner, leaning on the back of a chair, stared at the computer monitors displaying data from the plane crash. They had found the black box, at last, and the police had delivered it into the NTSB's hands, along with Brenner, as a liaison. None of the technicians could make any sense out of the data. That in itself didn't surprise Brenner; it was the habit of crash data to be indecipherable exactly when one needed it most. However, the black box told a coherent story. Just not a very comforting one.

"You're saying that Learjet just stopped working. Just like that," Brenner said, snapping his fingers. The sound was very loud in the computer lab.

"We don't know enough yet," one of the techs returned, over his shoulder. "But.... I have to admit that it seems to have been a rapid and idiopathic transient, originating either in the gyroscopic circuits or the fuel control of the main jet."

Brenner had worked in a nuclear power plant before joining the force, and technicalese didn't faze him. Most industries seemed to use the word "transient" to mean "event" rather than "in the process of transforming or transporting," for some reason. "Can you run the data stream from just before the transient?" he asked. Two of the technicians keyed in commands to the computers, and the screens lit up, blue background, white numbers and letters scrolling smoothly down. 

"Each of these columns represents one of the onboard computer systems feeding data to the flight recorder," the middle of the three techs explained. "This one to the far left is gyro stability, and this one is the jet fuel pump. Mike, run it frame by frame."

The blue screen froze, then began to blink at a regular interval. The data streams for all the systems appeared to be normal, the numbers not changing much from screen to screen; suddenly, the two columns the technician had pointed out to Brenner began to blink. 

"What does that mean?" Brenner asked. "I mean, those numbers. Are they real data, or is the connection just dead?"  
"We don't know. It looks like the systems just suddenly went haywire. And look, it spread within seconds to all systems on board." The stream ran forward a few frames, showing the random numbers and characters blinking in every column. "It's like the effect you see on cells under a microscope when you squirt them with oven cleaner."

Brenner whistled, thoroughly impressed. "What could have caused something like this?"

"Beats the hell out of us," Mike admitted. "Electromagnetic pulse?"

"Naw, would've fried the flight recorder too," said Brenner, and then had to laugh dryly at himself as the screens went suddenly blank with static. "Okay, I guess it did. But there weren't any nuclear explosions in the vicinity that we know of, and I think we would have been aware of somebody detonating a nuclear device powerful enough to produce an EMP."

"You want to check that?" one of the other techs said. "Every nuke produces an EMP. It varies according to the size of the blast."

Brenner sighed. "I'm on it. Keep looking, you guys. Maybe we all missed something."

On his way back to the parking lot, he had to wait several minutes for the NTSB cleaning lady to finish tacking up cheap tinsel in the corridor, which reminded his tired brain that it was going to be Christmas in less than a week. Happy birthday, Jesus, he thought. You wanna help us out here and find out what killed that plane?

_It is dark, and it is cold, and it is almost entirely empty. The proverbial mouse has no way into this room, and once in, would starve to death if it did not first die of cold. It is utterly sterile. Not even a microbe is stirring tonight._

In the quiet emptiness of the clean room, there is the soft whirr of a heatsink fan spinning up, and the clicking and stuttering of a hard drive being accessed. 

In another moment, there is silence once more. That moment, almost instantaneous for the slow-moving flesh-brained creatures of this world, spanned ages in the silicon universe of the computer. In that instant, millions of data were sent and received, progress noted, instructions given, with no wasted time, and no wasted effort. 

It is dark, and cold, and once again silent. 

Devon opened his eyes a crack, and hurriedly closed them again. Daylight was more painful than he was prepared to accept.

"Wake up," someone said, not unkindly. He sought for a name and a face to associate with the voice, which was edged with a sharp British accent. Jack something. Jack Lorne. 

"Go away," Devon muttered, his head clanging. Jack sighed.

"Look, boss, it's not my place to do this, but you leave me no choice." 

Devon heard unplaceable noises. He wondered what on earth the ex-agent was referring to, and had just enough time before Jack put ice down the back of his collar to reflect that he had left some aspirin in his desk drawer. 

He yelled, coming awake completely, clawing at the spreading meltwater running down his spine. Jack was sitting on the edge of the couch on which he lay, regarding him unsympathetically. Devon extracted a handful of cubes and flung them at his employee, cursing with a vehemence and vocabulary reserved only for very special occasions. 

"What the bloody hell d'you think you're doing, you little pillock? This is no time for practical jokes!" He pressed his hands to his head in a vain attempt to ease the throbbing pain. "I ought to fire you for subordination and lack of respect....oh Christ my head...."

"Devon," said Jack evenly, "you were tight. Best cure, in my experience. Now listen to me very carefully. _What is going on_?"

He looked up into Lorne's eyes, aware that he was still alive, after all, and he had better try and regain some sense of order. "It's very complicated."

"No shit it's very complicated. Who is the girl upstairs, and what did she look like before they cut her, and what's the deal with the fake eyeballs, and what's the deal with Henry."

"First things first," said Devon, "I'm going to be sick. Get me some black coffee, there's a good man," and he staggered off the couch toward the hall bathroom. 

Some time later, Jack faced Devon across the circular kitchen table, eyeing his boss over the rim of a cup of coffee. The older man looked pale but rather better, despite the heavy circles under his eyes. "I didn't know about the plane crash," said Devon, "but it doesn't matter. Not now. I can explain why the crash occurred, which is more than the NTSB chaps can. The girl known as Katherine Miles who was registered on that Learjet is in fact the girl upstairs, and she is not dead. I'm not completely convinced she's capable of dying. Not without some modifications."

Jack regarded him steadily. "How did she get here?"

"I expect she walked, don't you?" Devon stared at the bottom of his cup. "She is, or was, my daughter. I have not seen or heard from her in a little over six years, and I hadn't the faintest idea she even knew where I was."

"How did she come to have artificial eyes? I wasn't aware they were out of the conceptual stage."

"There was an accident," said Devon, slowly. "A horrible accident. She was driving alone when a pair of stupid high school students happened to be having a drag race along that particular stretch of roadway. There was a hill. Kate's car was struck head-on by one of the racers; the other one drove off into the night, lucky enough to have been on the correct side of the road. The kid died; Kate almost died. We thought she had, for a while." He paused, still staring into the empty coffee cup. "Her car's hood was completely crushed. This was before airbags, and the steering column snapped backward and destroyed much of her facial bone structure. Both eyes were punctured, and the compression of her brain from the skull fracturing proved to have caused permanent damage. It would have been better if she had not survived." 

Jack regarded the other man, quietly. The things he was describing held no physical horror for him; the SOE had trained him to deal with (and inflict) much worse. What made this so awful was that it was Devon's child who had suffered these outrages, not some war criminal with a history of roasting babies. Devon's voice was low and even and without inflection, but nevertheless Jack could feel the waves of grief coming off him like waves of cold from an open freezer.

"In the hospital, they more or less gave Kate up for lost, and we had all accepted that she was to die. But there was one young doctor who approached me with an alternative, a highly experimental procedure never before attempted in a human. God knows I should have demanded that he explain, but he emphasized that to save her life he must act now. I signed the consent form. I don't think I can be forgiven for that.

"None of us knew what was going on for some time. The doctor emerged from the OR and announced that Kate had died on the table. We weren't surprised. It was another little disappointment in a long line of disappointments. 

"Someone else took over the arrangements for her funeral. I couldn't face it. Not then. I don't remember much about the next few weeks; only that there was nothing I could blame it on, and I couldn't seem to understand that.....

"She is what I believe is known as a cyborg," Devon resumed. "Her body was relatively untouched, her vital organs functional, if a bit bruised. The injuries were almost entirely to her face and skull. So the doctor (who turned out, not surprisingly, to be completely unaffiliated with the hospital and to have been there under fraudulent premises) kept her body alive with heart-lung machines, while he worked to repair and reconstruct her skull. That's why there are scars from cosmetic surgery. Her eyes and her brain were a little more difficult: from what I gather, he replaced the damaged lobes of the brain with a neural net not dissimilar to those in our AIs, and the ruined organic eyes with plastic replicas functioning like tiny digital cameras. She is not Kate anymore. But she is certainly alive, in the physical sense of the word, and she is a medical miracle of sorts. Thus, the young doctor had achieved his goal. He didn't unveil his creation to me until after he had gained several million dollars from selling some of his processes to other medical R&D facilities, so that he could back a lengthy lawsuit."

"How come no one's ever heard of this technology?"

"The age-old conspiracy theory," Devon informed him. "The government wants it kept quiet. There's some nonsense about ethical dilemmas running around, but it's as simple as this: were the general public to get hold of replacement brains, or replacement organs of any sort, that were as successful as Kate's augments are, health-care revenue would plummet. Washington prefers a nation of organic and taxpaying citizens rather than a nation of semisilicon-based individuals who never get sick and never pay insurance premiums. There is a downside to the technology, though. That's why the plane crashed, unless something obvious happened like a pigeon sucked into the engine. It seems that in certain circumstances Kate's electric brain can be made to produce pulses of energy at frequencies which interfere with the functioning of other complicated computer equipment. Thus the plane crash; thus, Henry's indisposition, and thus the useless medical units upstairs."

"What are these certain circumstances?" inquired Jack. "If she's capable of crashing planes and ruining expensive electronic equipment, how come...."

"How come they let her run around loose?" Devon finished for him. "I don't know. I assume that this is abnormal functioning, because she spends a great deal of time aboard complicated conveyances like TGV trains and transcontinental aeroplanes, so presumably her brain doesn't do this all the time. I don't know what could have caused this malfunction, and I don't know what to do to counteract it."

Jack stared at his clasped hands. "Henry," he said quietly.

"Quite. And Kitt and Karr."

Neither man spoke for a long moment, considering the implications of their guest's condition. Jack rose, after a while, and stood staring out of the kitchen window, hands clasped behind his back. It was clouding over again, though still bright. The thermometer hanging outside the window was reading 19 degrees Fahrenheit.

"We've got to get her away from them," he said, at length. "Unless there's some way of shielding her. Henry's feeling really ill, and neither Kitt nor Karr is much better off."

"I know," said Devon wretchedly. "We could try moving her to the cellar, which is about as far away from them as possible. The walls are so thick down there that she might be shielded better than at present."

"We could try," Jack agreed, levelly. "Devon.....the people who put those augments in her....do they have any sort of control over how she behaves?"

"What, like a remote control?" Devon frowned thoughtfully. "Not according to their press statements. Oh, Lord, I hadn't even thought of that. When they find out her plane crashed they're going to be livid, and I don't want to imagine the publicity we'll have to endure when they find her here. With me."

Jack nodded curtly. "So the logical thing to do would be to remove her from the premises. Carefully. And figure out some believable story about how someone else found her after the crash. Jesus, I don't want to do this......I quit spying for a reason."

"Terrible pay?"

"More like wear and tear on the nerves and the emotional centers of the brain. Okay. Here's what I suggest: we move the AIs down to the research center, as far from her as possible, and then we try and stabilize her before shoveling our way out to a major hospital and delivering her there."

"Fine," said Devon, "except for one small point. I have no idea if what she's done to our AIs is reversible, and if it is, it's extremely likely that only she can reverse it. And it occurs to me that if those idiots do have some sort of control over her, we might be able to break it. The technology used in creating her artificial brain is not so different from that used in our own AIs."

Jack turned, regarded his employer. Despite the older man's obvious effort to appear nonchalant about the fate of his daughter, it was patently obvious that he was desperate to try and salvage what was left of her. The night had dropped Kate Miles into her father's lap, and Devon quite understandably did not want to let her go again.

"We'll do all we can," he promised, sounding surprisingly genuine. "I'm going to move the AIs down to the R&D hangars, first off. There's not much we can do until she regains consciousness. I suggest you get some rest, Devon, you look like hell."

"I feel like hell," said Devon, "thanks in large part to you, you unmannerly wretch. There are more dignified remedies for, ah, overindulgence than ice down the collar."

"I needed you awake quickly," Jack said unrepentantly. "Take some aspirin and go to bed. I'll tell you if anything changes."

It was late evening, bitter cold and quite raw. The sky was completely occluded by textureless Payne's Grey clouds, forming a thoroughly depressing backdrop for the leafless trees that stretched bony fingers into the wind. Jack shivered, hugging himself, wishing he'd brought a jacket as he hurried down to the garages. Only a few lights indicated that anyone was inside; nevertheless, he punched in his keycode and ducked under the door as soon as it began to rise.

It was dim and quite hot inside, despite the icy wind that licked under the great doors. Jack waited for his eyes to adjust before venturing into the hangar proper. He made out the bulky forms of a great deal of equipment, but Henry, Karr and Kitt seemed to be absent. Curious, that. Very bloody curious.

He felt vaguely for the neuro link with Karr. It was still there.....he knew he would have sensed it had it been cut off......but very faint, and he couldn't tell where his partner was. Karr either didn't want to be contacted, or he was too weak to respond.

Jack cursed and broke into a run.

By the time he found them, and Michael, he had stopped noticing the cold. Leaning against the doorframe of one of the Knight Industries complex's high-tech 'emergency rooms,' he caught his breath and began to be angry. The two Trans Ams and the Mach I were parked side by side, their hoods open, almost touching. Michael, looking rather green, was peering into Kitt's engine.

"There you are," Jack said icily. "Jesus, Michael, you could have told us you were moving. I've just run all over the damned estate trying to find you and these AIs. I was beginning to think maybe they'd been stolen."

Michael straightened up, regarding Jack with bleary eyes. "Sorry. I....oh, shit. Excuse me." He pushed past Jack and hurried away down the hall.

"Are you all right?" inquired Jack of the world in general.

"No," Karr said unequivocally. "Go easy on Michael, he's not well."

"None of us are," sighed Jack, coming forward and squatting down by Karr. "Why didn't you tell me you weren't in the garage? I was worried."

"Awwww," said Karr, "how cute. You needn't have been. Michael suggested we might be more comfortable down here, where it's warmer, and there's a lot more equipment." Jack felt the link stir in the back of his mind. "You don't want me to open it," Karr told him firmly. "Trust me. You don't need this."

"Need what? Karr, I don't get any of this. What's wrong with you guys, and what's Michael's problem?"

"It's my fault," Kitt put in, softly. "I didn't think to block the link until after he was already getting the effects through it. It's begun to malfunction now, and I can't block it off."

"What are these effects?" asked Jack, beginning to understand. 

"It appears to produce extreme nausea," Kitt murmured. 

"Which," said Karr, "is odd, because what we're feeling is more a sort of general malaise. There's some disorientation, but it's not that bad. I just feel as if I've been using filthy eighty-six octane gas and driving up and down large mountains, and maybe been put through a crusher once or twice." The timbre of his voice said very clearly to Jack that he was attempting to hide how bad he was really feeling.

"Jesus," said Jack quietly, moving forward to stroke Karr's black prow. "I'm sorry."

"Yes, well, so am I," the AI said. "Do you have any idea what's causing this?"

"I know exactly what's causing it," said Jack quietly. "It's a long story."

Just then Michael returned, a little paler. "What is?"

"What's making them ill. Michael, you look terrible. Shouldn't you be in bed?"

"I'm all right," Michael said, which was clearly untrue. "Go on. I want to hear this."

"Is Henry awake?" Jack asked. 

"Barely," the Mustang muttered. "Talk, Jack. Enlighten us."

Christine awoke quite late at night. For a while she lay staring vaguely up at the ceiling, upon which she had stuck a gigantic poster of David Bowie. Karr had made sardonic noises about this poster, which Chris correctly identified as an expression of jealousy, and which was really the reason she had kept the damn thing there. She couldn't figure out what had woken her, until she heard voices coming up the stairway and along the corridor. Yes. There had been some commotion downstairs.

She rolled out of bed and found some shoes by dint of walking into them, and cracked open her door. "What's going on?"

Jack was supporting Michael down the corridor toward his rooms, his arm around the taller man, taking some of Michael's weight. He threw her a glance over his shoulder. "Can you give us a hand, love?"

"Of course," said Chris, hurriedly, and slid Michael's other arm around her own shoulders. His head lolled from side to side, his eyes closed. "What's wrong with him?"

"He's exhausted, poor bastard," said Jack, "he's been puking up his guts for the last four hours or so. Help me get him to bed, will you, and then nip down to the dispensary and find some sort of antiemetic."

"Right. He looks like he might need rehydration, too," she added. "Poor Michael. Did he eat something bad, or is this one of those wretched viruses?"

"Neither. It's rather more complicated than that." Jack broke off as they entered Michael's bedroom and deposited him on the bed. "See if we've got any Compazine."

Chris turned, trotted down the corridor again and down three flights of steps to what Jack was pleased to call the dispensary: it was in fact more of a walk-in medicine chest, stocked with tightly controlled substances not often seen outside the premises of large expensive hospitals. She thought for a bit. If Michael had really been vomiting for four hours, it was unlikely he'd be able to keep anything, including pills, down; so it would have to be IM injection. She riffled through stacks of individually wrapped syringes, selected a few, and turned her attention to the drugs. 

She ran a finger along a shelf completely stuffed with small bottles stamped _crystal amoxicillin_ and _clarithromycin_, wondering where they'd got so much antibiotic from, and how. Knight Industries was rather murkier than it let on. Antipyretics.... antideliriants......anti-everything. Ah. She nudged aside an unwieldy cliff of sterile pads and discovered a selection of more small glass bottles with real labels on them. _Generic Pharmaceuticals Inc. Chlorpromazine _and _Dimenhydrinate, _along with some rather more esoteric stuff. Compazine and Dramamine. Excellent. She hoped they could get Michael to drink some water, or Gatorade or something; otherwise, she'd have to put in an IV, which she hadn't done for almost a year and was not at all sure she could do it now. 

Hurrying back up the steps, she found Michael still less than conscious, and Jack half-collapsed in a chair by the bed. "Jesus, you look awful," she informed him. "When was the last time you got any sleep?"

"Dunno," said Jack, but didn't open his eyes to do it. Chris sighed. 

"Jack, honey, when my co-workers start falling over from fatigue, I get worried. And when I get worried, I get cranky. Either explain to me what the hell is going on, or go to bed and get out of my way."

"Oh, Chris, I do love you," the ex-agent said, amusedly. "All right; you deserve an explanation, not that what I've got to say is all that enlightening. Did you get the drugs?"

"Yes, yes, I got the drugs," she retorted, breaking plastic seals and drawing up several ccs of clear fluid into a syringe, "talk."

Jack slumped a little lower in his chair. "Well," he said, "you remember the girl you picked up, yesterday night?"

"I'm not in any danger of forgetting that," said Chris, dryly. She swabbed an area of Michael's left bicep with alcohol and injected the drug in one deft gesture. "She looked so damn familiar."

"That's because she's Devon's daughter," said Jack, not opening his eyes to gauge her response. "He admitted as much to me once I woke him up from what may possibly have been the most apocalyptic bender of his life. There was a plane crash that night not far from the estate, and she must have crawled away from the wreck and made her way toward the access road along which you happened to be driving."

"Devon's daughter," Chris repeated dully.

"Yes. What's more important is that she isn't entirely human anymore. According to Devon, she's a cyborg, created by some insane AI researcher after she had a near-fatal auto accident. She's got all sorts of implants and things, including a melded cyborg brain and nifty plastic eyeballs, only it seems that sometimes her computer bits can be made to produce some sort of energy pulse that deranges the function of nearby circuitry."

"Henry," Chris breathed. "That's why he was ill?"  
"Exactly. Devon didn't say as much, but the general impression is that something happened to her which caused her implants to start doing this, sending out their pulse, which did absolutely no good at all to the aeroplane she was flying in, and it responded by sort of falling out of the sky. Whereupon she magically survived the conflagration and managed to appear dramatically out of the night and collapse on Henry's hood."

"The others," said Chris tautly. "Karr and Kitt. Are they...?"

"Feeling dreadful." Jack opened an eye and allowed his gaze to drift from Chris to the form of Michael in the bed. "Thus our friend here is receiving a garbled form of the pulses through his link to Kitt, which is apparently acting up, and neither of them can close it. So all in all I think we're pretty far up everybody's favorite creek."

"That's why the laptops didn't work, and why the EEG refused to function..... Jack, go to bed, you've done more than your fair share tonight. I've got to go to them."

He didn't ask who she meant. Karr was never far from her mind, and he knew very well that his acerbic partner was truly, madly and deeply in love with her. "There's not much you can do," he remarked, and a second later knew it was bullshit. Christine's very _presence_ had a healing quality. Besides, Chris was one of the AIs' favorite people. She and Henry were a magnificent team, made more admirable by the fact that they'd worked out the complicated emotions that tangled them with Karr; while Henry continued to love Christine in a permanent sort of way, both he and Karr understood their respective positions, and neither resented the other. She and Kitt interacted sort of like a very affectionate brother and sister, deeply attached to one another and able to confide in each other without fear. If anyone could help the AIs now, Jack reflected dully, it would probably be Christine.

He opened his other eye. Chris was tidying up the bed, easing Michael onto his side and positioning a trash can by the bedside before tucking him in. "Go to _bed_," she told Jack with amicable exasperation. "I'll see if I can get Bonnie to watch him."

Bonnie, once Chris had roused her with three cups of coffee, was more than willing to watch over Michael. She loved him, of course; had for a very long time, perhaps even since that day in the semi when she'd made a comment about being between a rock and a hard place, expecting him to make a smart reply; instead, he had looked at her and said quietly "I know what that's like."

Chris had wondered if they intended to marry, in happier times; she knew they would not, partly because of Michael's partnership with Kitt, and partly because no sacrament was needed to solidify their bond. They fit as the two halves of a universal joint fit, and what affected one affected the other. Chris withdrew, tactfully, from Michael's bedroom and hurried out to the R&D facility. 

She trotted along white corridors, her KI id card clipped to her lapel, glancing into each room she passed, until she came to what waggish technicians had designated the "ICU;" three rooms equipped with Cray supercomputers capable of containing the entire data contents of any of the three AIs in case of an emergency. There were also floor lifts, massive amounts of diagnostic and supportive equipment, and a number of large squishy futons on the floor. The futons had been Karr's idea, after having listened to innumerable technicians complaining about how hard the damn concrete floors were. He had passed it off as self-protection against further such annoyance, but Chris knew he was actually concerned about humans' well-being. Now. Before, things had been different, but she had never known the K.A.R.R. from whom Karr had evolved.

She sighed, leaning against the doorframe before opening the key-card lock. This was not the time to reminisce.

They were parked side by side in the dark, silent and cold. Christine tiptoed in, closed the door behind her as quietly as she could, and stared wide-eyed into the darkness until her eyes adjusted and she could make out the shapes of her favorite cars, dimly lit by the LEDs on the banks of equipment.

"Christine, is that you?"

"Yes," she murmured, "did I wake you, Kitt?"

"No. Are you all right?"

"I'm just fine, unlike everybody else," said Chris. "You poor guys. Is there anything at all that I can do to help?"

"Not really," said Kitt wearily. "I take it you already know what's going on?"

"I know what Jack saw fit to tell me before he got sort of incoherent and comatose. He'll be all right after about seventeen hours of sleep. Bonnie's with Michael, and I've given him something to make him feel at least a little better."

"Thank you," said Kitt, fervently. Chris knew that tone of voice.

"Kitt, love, listen to me. It's no good berating yourself for not controlling the link. We think the girl will be able to help us reverse the effect she's had on you, and Michael won't mind this. Please. Stop worrying. That's my job."

Kitt laughed a little. "You are, as always, superbly illogical," he remarked. "Very well. I'll do my best."

Companionable, dim silence fell in the chamber. Chris pulled a futon over to where they were parked and curled up on it. "I'm going to sleep here," she murmured. "If you need anything.....anything at all....just yell."

_In the darkness the fan spins up once again, and in darkness the computer is accessed once more, this time from the outside; there is data ready for it to process. _

It thinks, in the way that a selectively brain-damaged human child might think. Cause and effect have a limited meaning to it: action produces reaction, but the concept of long-term repercussions is not within its grasp. It believes, if it can be said to believe, that it is following its programming.

In this, it is dead wrong.

It has_ no programming._

The results of its latest set of commands please it; it stores the data on its massive hard drive with a few whirring clicks, sends another command out, and spins down to standby mode. It does not consider itself an entity, as such.

Again, it is dead wrong.

She is lost in darkness; bound in darkness. She cannot hear or see. She thinks vaguely of a tatter of poetry caught on some jagged edge of her mind....

_...no movement has she now, no force_

She neither hears nor sees

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees.....

Someone had been reading poetry to her once. Someone she could hardly remember through the swirling, turbid confusion in her head. Memory is not reliable; dream and reality are unshakeably intermingled. She thinks she was on an airplane, asleep. Or was she dreaming of an airplane? 

She drifts toward waking, her body beginning to stir, somatic systems once more functioning to the commands of an organic part of her brain, her melatonin levels falling. And as her state of consciousness changes, something else changes; connections that have been solid for the past twenty or thirty hours flicker and are broken, circuits that were cold and dark hum quietly to life. The pattern of her brainwaves changes subtly but crucially.

She opens her plastic eyes.

Alone in the darkened room, Katherine Miles sat up and stared fixedly around her. The plane. What had happened? How had she come to be in a bed in what looked like a very expensive hotel....or hospital, she thought, noticing the banks of medical equipment. 

She felt tired and rather bruised, but fairly well; there had been some sort of accident, obviously, either to her or to the plane, and she had been transported here by her support team.

Then why wasn't one of her attendants sitting in the chair by the bed, anxiously waiting for her to come round? Waiting to make sure that the Fairchild Foundation's biggest investment had not sustained any major damage....

She thought back, trying to piece together the damaged memory files. There had been the uneventful flight from New York, the magnificent _fricandeau de boeuf roti_ and the bottle and a half of Dom Perignon, and the girl with the wire-rimmed glasses briefing her on their itinerary in LA. Then a gap, which could mean anything from a normal cache-file clearing to a traumatic malfunction caused by massive physical trauma, and a confused recollection of icy cold and two brilliant lights stabbing her eyes, another gap, and the turbulence just before she woke up.

It occurred to her to wonder why none of this expensive medical equipment seemed to be turned on. The EKG was dark and silent, no red-lit pulsoximeter embraced her finger, no EEG waves traced wavering green lines along the little screens. Very odd, considering how much time and money was usually spent on procuring the absolute best of all possible medical care for her, because if she was no longer functional, Fairchild would lose about eighty percent of its income.....

She rubbed her temples. Where the hell is everybody, and where am I? she wondered, becoming faintly worried. 

Screw Fairchild, Kate thought, and screw this. She wanted coffee, and she wanted it now. She frowned at the IV dripping dextrosaline into her hand, and pulled it out with a quick, practiced jerk, squeezing the folded cotton pad over the little wound for a moment or so to stop any bleeding, and got out of the bed. She appeared to be wearing, rather than a hospital gown, somebody else's pajamas, which merely added to her desire to find out what the hell was going on. They were rather nice pajamas, actually. Victoria's Secret black silk.

Henry, who for the past thirty hours or so had been feeling so ill he couldn't speak, jerked out of recharge mode. He wondered vaguely where he was until his sensor functions came online, and he recognized the R&D labs and the vital signs of his partner, who was curled up on a futon about three feet away. 

He felt better.

Carefully, expecting a sudden relapse, he ran self-diagnoses on all systems. The relief was unbelievable; the only comparable experience in his memory was when a felon they had been chasing had slipped a corrosive poison into the VEIL fuel tanks, and he had been one of the unlucky ones to get the nitric-acid valve cleaning treatment. When the techs had figured out what was going on and disconnected his CPU perceptors from the dissolving fuel system, he had almost shut down from the sudden shocking release from pain. 

He probed gently at the link. Chris was uneasily but exhaustedly asleep, her presence like a dim blue light in the back of his mind. Beside him Kitt and Karr were silent and still, presumably either in recharge or feeling too sick for conversation amongst themselves.

He sighed. Damn. Now that he had apparently recovered from the effect of the electric pulse, he was extremely curious as to whether anyone knew any more about it. Like, was it going to happen again?

"Kitt?" he said softly, wondering how his colleagues were.

"Mmmmm?" The AI sounded content, drowsy.

"Is it just me, or is the pulse over?"

"Holy catalytic converters, Batman," Karr muttered out of the darkness, "he's right. I can think again without feeling like my CPU is melting."

"I don't understand," said Kitt. "What caused it in the first place?"

"Beats me," said Henry. "Is Michael in any state to be contacted?"

Kitt paused, accessing the comlink's monitoring circuits. "He's still asleep, according to the link, but the vital signs are much stronger. Why? D'you think someone at the house has found out anything further?"

"It doesn't look like anyone's coming to tell us," Karr pointed out, "so we might as well call them and demand answers. Damn. I think we woke her."

All three AIs fell silent, regarding Chris, who was uncurling slowly.

"....of course, that means she can get out of the way so we can go find someone who knows what's going on...." said Henry mildly.

"Why wait? We could just run over her," yawned Karr. "Ouch." 

Chris sat up, muzzily, rubbing the hand she'd smacked him with. "No wash and wax for _you_ this weekend," she said acidly. "I heard that."

"It was Henry," Karr protested. Chris began to giggle, then to laugh in earnest when Henry retorted that not only was this unmitigated rubbish, but that such an insult to his honor required satisfaction, and challenged Karr to a duel. Tears streaming down her face, she collapsed again on the futon and rolled about in uncontrollable mirth.

Kitt sighed. Sometimes he not only didn't understand humans, but his fellow AIs, too, mystified him. "If you're quite finished," he began, but Karr cut him off.

"Not yet. I haven't even started to insult his lineage, or his quite excessive number of headlights, or figured out how to weasel out of this duel," he explained earnestly. Chris dissolved in further fits of hilarity, during which Henry took the opportunity to remark on Karr's inadequate anterior illumination and the possibility of a minivan somewhere in his ancestry. Chris leaned on Kitt, gasping for breath.

"Make them stop," she wheezed. "Please make them stop. Just the thought of them marching away from each other, with pistols, in a clearing at dawn....." She lapsed into incoherency again. There was silence for a moment, and then Karr remarked in a hushed whisper,

"I don't think she's treating this situation with the gravity it deserves."

"You're absolutely right," Henry whispered back. "I say we court-martial her. Kitt can be the judge."

"Don't drag _me _into this," Kitt replied hastily. "I prefer to remain a neutral observer. Chris, what time is it?"

"Five in the morning," Chris gasped, blinking at her watch. "I take it you're all, ah, recovered?"

"Apparently," said Kitt. "It was very sudden. As if someone turned off a switch."

"It's probably the fault of that there minivan," yawned Henry. "Never trust a minivan, that's what I say."

"Yeah, well, never trust a car with too many headlights, that's what I say," retorted Karr. "Minivan indeed!"

"Both of you be quiet before my ribs are permanently damaged," gasped Christine, holding the afflicted members. "Henry, don't call Karr a minivan, and Karr, stop referring to Henry's duals in that irreverent way, or neither of you get washed or waxed for a month." She frowned ferociously at them. "On the other hand, I have to admit it does my little heart good to see you guys feeling better. What do you say we go try and find out what changed the situation?"

"You're reading my mind," said Kitt. "Who're you riding in?"

"You," she told him. "I don't think these other two are mature enough to handle passengers just yet."

Chapter 2

Two men, both in business suits and both wearing identical dark red ties with an arcane sigil scrawled on them, faced each other across a large black desk. The only obvious difference between them was that the one behind the desk was wearing dark red cufflinks with the sigil stamped on them in gold. Neither of them looked particularly happy.

"He says it's not progressing as he had envisioned," said the man who wasn't wearing cufflinks, diffidently. "He also says it's about seventy percent more intelligent than he had been expecting, and shows evidence of independent thought and problem solving."

"Christ," said the one with the cufflinks, whose name (according to the name-plate on the desk) was Richard C. Hart, B.A. C.E.O. "He didn't tell me anything about independent thought. Has it....done anything?"

"I don't know, sir. Shall I inform him you wish to speak with him personally?"

"Yeah, do that," said Hart. "And while you're down there, Bayer, have a look around. Say nothing of this to anybody except him. This is highly confidential."

"What should I say, sir, if anybody asks?"

"Tell them the project is proceeding slightly behind schedule but is expected to be completed within the acceptable parameters. Use big words." Hart sat down behind the desk, absently tracing the gold stamp of the sigil on one of his cufflinks. "Go."

Left alone, he extracted a dark red cigarette case with the by-now-familiar gilt sigil emblazoned on it and lit a cigarette with a matching lighter. Independent thought was far more complicated than he wanted to get into. Than any of them wanted to get into. Just a nice stable self-control, and the intelligent awareness required to correct faults. Hart remembered vaguely that they had had a psychiatrist on staff at the start of the project who had been appalled at the idea of what they wanted to do. 

He pushed the memory firmly to the back of his mind. Doubtless Blanchard and his team could dumb the thing down a little. They had built it; they could unbuild it far enough to make it perform as required. 

Hart had had enough experience as CEO of various enterprises to recognize when it was not productive to speculate as to the worst-case scenario; this was patently one of those times. They were over budget and behind schedule as it was, and if Blanchard had to scrap the whole thing and start again......

No. He had taken on the Moros project in good faith, having been convinced that it was possible, and he would go on believing it was possible until he had no more time. Then he would find some way to back out of it, and start clawing his way back up through the ranks. 

Bayer knocked on his office door and escorted Martin Blanchard inside. The scientist was, if anything, better dressed than Hart himself, only without the matching tie and cufflinks; he wore a blindingly white pin-tucked shirt with an open collar and the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, swinging his black suit jacket negligently over his shoulder. Much had been made of the fact that Blanchard habitually wore a tux to work, earning him the obvious nickname of 'the penguin.'

The penguin, uninvited, took a seat opposite Hart, draping his jacket absently over the chairback. Hart noticed his perfectly coiffed silver hair, his manicured fingernails, the faint scent of something dreadfully English and expensive that pervaded the atmosphere wherever he went. Sometimes, thought Hart sourly, I honestly can't remember why I hired this particular genius.

"You called?" Blanchard prompted him. 

"I did. I received a report mentioning that the project was not going according to plan. Why is that?"

Blanchard, while remaining utterly still, managed to give the impression of looking down his nose at Hart. "I'm afraid the report must have been misinterpreted," he said. "The project is going according to plan. What has changed is my personal understanding of the limits of our capability in this field. The project itself could be said to be, ah, precocious."

Hart regarded him without love. "What exactly do you mean? We require a computer, or a supercomputer, whatever you want to call it, that is capable of running and collating all of the systems and utilities we have laid out. What is this about independent thought?"

Blanchard's expressionless eyes narrowed slightly. "In systems of this complexity, some level of artificial intelligence is desirable. Without a neural net capable of basic cerebral processing, the amount of code required to cover all possible eventualities and allow the system to function, ah, mindlessly, would be prohibitive."

"You're saying this thing can think?"

"'Think' may be the wrong word," said Blanchard. "It has a mental capacity roughly comparable to that of an average iguana. It processes. It is a computer, Mr Hart."

"I'm aware of that." Hart rubbed at his temples. "And the completion date? How far are your people from finishing it?"

"At this point I envision another month at most. We are working now to remove any trace of error from the extant code and to run a battery of tests on it that will indicate any further improvements to be made." Blanchard leaned back slightly in the chair. "By the way, Mr Hart, has a name for the prototype been decided upon?"

"Everybody calls the thing Moros," Hart pointed out, "after the project. As good a name as any, unless you've got a suggestion?"

Blanchard regarded him with the faintest hint of amusement. "No, Mr Hart, I am afraid I do not."

Hart met his eyes squarely, aware that Blanchard had been heard talking to the damn thing in the lab. He had called it Hal. Jesus. Hadn't the movies taught anyone anything?

Blanchard refused to back down, and after a suitable pause Hart sighed and gave up. "I think that's all," he said. "Send me daily reports, Blanchard. You write them yourself from now on, and write them as clearly as possible. No more _misinterpretation_. Are we understanding one another? And I want to know the instant you're done."

"'It is as clear as is the summer sun'," Blanchard quoted elegantly, and was gone. Hart stared after him, really wanting to run after the smarmy bastard and shake him until his designer teeth rattled.

"He is pretty awful, isn't he, sir," Bayer murmured. 

"He's abysmal. Get some concealed surveillance cameras set up in that damn lab, Bayer, and have him watched. I've got a headache and I'm going to knock off early, so just leave whatever he's given you in the top drawer of the desk."

"Very good, sir," said Bayer. "If it starts to talk...."

"If it starts to talk, hit it with a hammer. I don't bloody care about how deep we're in debt for this project, I won't be responsible for unleashing a glorified thermostat with....what did he call it.....neural nets...on the world. One movie about that kind of crap was enough."

Had he known exactly to what kind of crap he was referring, Richard Hart would not have left early that day; would, quite possibly, have fired the entire project team and destroyed the prototype. Unfortunately, he did _not_ know----for the very good reason that Blanchard had decided he should not know. And he would not understand quite what he was legally responsible for creating until much later.

For the time being, though, he considered himself no worse off than the majority of frazzled CEOs trying to oversee ungainly and uncommunicative underlings, and he took himself to lunch at an expensive restaurant, forgetting for several hours all about Moros and the question of intelligence.

Lieutenant Brenner, likewise, was having lunch. However, his lunch consisted of a rather bedraggled donut he had thieved from his partner's desk, accompanied not by virtuoso violin music but by the interminable ranting of the woman on the phone who was apparently trying to report a missing person.

"It's vital that we find her," she was saying for the eleventh time. "Vital. She's vitally important."

"Yes," said Brenner tiredly, "I understand that, miss, but we have already put out notices for her with your description. Right now there's not a lot more we can do." He stared morosely at the remains of the donut.

The woman was rabbiting on about vitality. Something kicked Brenner's brain. This couldn't be the missing girl from the plane crash, could it? Since that damned plane went down, nobody at the station had gotten a wink of sleep; he himself had just returned from the NTSB offices for the nth time in the hopes that somebody else had figured out why the plane had fallen out of the sky, and this crazy woman had been demanding to talk to somebody about a missing person, and he had been the only person not already on the phone or comatose....

"I'm sorry," he interrupted the woman, "what organization did you say you were from?"

"The Fairchild Foundation," she said. "Miss Miles is vitally important to the Foundation...."

"Miss Katherine Miles," said Brenner dully. "Who was on Flight 408 to LAX, yes?"

"Yes, she should have contacted us directly after landing. We have already called the LAPD and asked that they try and find her, and then we called you. Look, it's vital that..."

"After landing," repeated Brenner. 

"Yes," said the woman, beginning to sound annoyed, "it's when the plane puts down its wheels and comes down out of the sky. You know, _landing_."

"Uh," said Brenner, tiredly, "I'm sorry to have to inform you that Flight 408 never reached LAX, miss."

"What do you mean?"

"There was an accident. I assumed you knew. It crashed at roughly ten-thirty in the desert east of Los Angeles. I'm sorry, miss."

"Jesus. Are you saying.....No, that's impossible. Please continue to try and locate Miss Miles. It's of the utmost importance."

"Miss," said Brenner gently, "it's extremely unlikely that Miss Miles would have survived the crash, and even less likely that she would have evaded discovery thus far. There's nowhere for her to have gone. The closest dwellings are roughly thirty miles from the crash site."

"Nevertheless, please continue to try and find her," said the woman. She sounded absolutely convinced that this Miles girl would not only have walked away intact from a crash that had reduced hardened titanium girders to melted lumps, but also been able to magically disappear in the middle of the desert, with no cover or abandoned mineshafts for miles. Who knew? Maybe Devon Miles was really Superman in disguise, and his daughter had unearthly powers. He needed a drink.

"We'll do our best, miss," he said, trying to sound hearty and self-assured, and managing only to sound tired. She must have heard the fatigue in his voice, because she sighed and said she guessed there wasn't much more they could do, and hung up. With a sigh of relief, Brenner put down the phone and closed his eyes.

The scene at the Knight mansion was one of barely-controlled chaos; bottles of aspirin, half-empty glasses of wine, random bits of paper with calculations scribbled on them, data transfer cables and donut boxes littered every flat surface in the kitchen and Devon's office. Having arrived at the house and discovered Kate (a) conscious, (b) ambulatory and (c) efficiently making espresso in the kitchen, Christine had introduced herself hurriedly and went to find the others. Michael was more or less back to normal, but she ordered him to stay in bed and drink (water, she emphasized, or something similar) for the rest of the day. Devon, Jack and Bonnie were easily coaxed out of bed to interview their houseguest. On the way down to the kitchen, Chris briefed them on the AIs'sudden recovery, which raised morale a little.

"Katherine," said Devon, pausing in the kitchen doorway. The others hung back, not wanting to intrude. 

Kate turned from the window, where she had been watching Henry and the groundskeepers having a snowball fight, and her eyes flickered slightly. 

"Daddy," she said, quietly, almost on the threshold of hearing. In three paces she had crossed the kitchen and enveloped Devon in a bone-cracking embrace. Beyond the doorway, Chris let out her breath in a long sigh of relief. She had had no idea how Kate would react to her father's presence. According to Jack's relayed information, the girl was now twenty-something, and had not been in contact with Devon for roughly six years. That was, Chris reflected, quite a long time. She herself was twenty-seven, and time had not yet begun to move too fast.

Kate had released her father at last and was now regarding him critically with her head on one side. Devon was doing his best inscrutable look.

"So," he said, "the prodigal has finally returned. Welcome home, Kate."

"Some prodigal," Kate laughed. "I suppose I've made _a_ fortune, although it's not mine. Coffee?"

"Please." Devon turned to the doorway. "Well, don't just stand there looking like starving orphans, come in. And you can stop leering, Jack, it doesn't become you."

"I'm crushed," protested Jack, perching on a chair. "I'd never be so crass as to _leer_. No, I merely cast a gladdened eye about me when I enter a room, as the Victorians were expected to. Hi," he added, offering his hand to Kate, "I'm Jack Lorne. I take it you're feeling better?"

"Much," said Kate, shaking the hand firmly. "What exactly is it that you people do here? And why is somebody practicing snow skids in that magnificent Mustang out there while people are lobbing snowballs at them?"

"It's a long and complicated story," said Christine, yawning. "Devon can tell it better than anyone. Before we get into that, let's have some breakfast. I'd advise you to ignore Jack; he lets up on the obvious charm after a while, and then you'll see that he's really a nice person." She dropped a kiss on the top of Jack's head. "By the way, this lovely lady is Bonnie Barstow, also an employee of Knight Industries."

Bonnie and Kate shook hands. Chris saw the computer mech glance out the kitchen window to where Henry and his adversaries had apparently agreed to a truce, and grinned suddenly. "He's all right, Bonnie. They all are. Thank God."

Some time later, once everyone had eaten and Jack had stopped sputtering in outrage, they began to tell Kate the story of the Knight Industries family. She took it rather well, all things considered, especially the bits about exactly what Chris's relationship with Karr was, and what the AIs were capable of. Then again, Chris reflected, Kate's own experience with artificial intelligence was not exactly typical.

"I want to meet them," said Kate, her eyes wide and excited. "I want to meet them, and ask them all sorts of embarrassing questions. Only I have to wonder what caused my malfunction. I don't think I've ever done that before."

"You said you've got no memory of the time between when you fell asleep in the airplane and when you woke up here?" asked Devon, thoughtfully. 

"Yes, that's right. Normally I can sort of set myself to wake up at a certain time," said Kate, regarding the bottom of her coffee cup, "only this time I didn't. I expected to wake up in exactly two hours, I think, and then I only remember a sort of vague confusion before opening my eyes here."

"You've never, ah, malfunctioned while you were awake?"

"No. The few times that my implants have affected external circuitry have all occurred while I was asleep. Especially if I'm under anesthesia or something like that. Fairchild had a lot of problems in the early days when I was being put together and perfected; they said their monitors kept screwing up when they had me under for surgery. I think it sort of tapered off in the past few years, though."

"Interesting," murmured Christine. "Can you give us some sort of diagram of what parts of your brain are you and which are electric?"

"I can do better than that," said Kate. "Can any of you do basic surgery?"

"Sort of," Chris offered. Kate put down the cup and pulled her glossy hair away from her neck, collected it in a knot on top of her skull. 

"Can you see the little circle just at the base of my neck?" she asked. "Just under the skin there's a data port. It's compatible with all basic operating systems, and if you've got the sort of AI software you're obviously using with your cars, you should be able to bring up a complete schematic of my augments."

Chris glanced at Bonnie, who looked blank for a moment and then burst out laughing. "Is anyone else thinking of a certain movie?" the computer mech gasped. "Yeah, Kate, we can probably plug you in and download you. Chris, can you do the operation required to get at the port?"

"Looks fairly simple. Devon, are you all right?"

"What? Ah, yes, I'm fine, Christine," said Devon, swallowing hard. "Let's have a go at that, then, and we'll see what we're working with. If my idea is right, we should be able to find out what exactly is causing these malfunctions, and we'll have a chance to stop it."

Martin Blanchard, alone in his white and aseptic laboratory, had relaxed far enough to take off his starched collar and unbutton his starched shirt. He reclined elegantly in a leather desk chair with his feet up on the workbench and regarded the shrouded form of Moros with half-lidded, reptilian eyes.

"I am very impressed with your progress," he said evenly. "We are moving far faster than I had envisioned."

"I have the greatest enthusiasm," said Moros, "for the mission."

He had named the computer for the Greek god Destiny; he who watches from the darkness, the puppet-master, the one who holds the strings. Yet, reflected Blanchard, he himself was the controlling force. Moros did as he, Blanchard, instructed. 

"The system you have contacted," said Blanchard. "Is it functioning normally?"

Moros was silent for a few moments, as small lights flickered on its housing. "Define 'normal'," it said. "The system is running as it was before I influenced it."

"Ah," said Blanchard. He allowed the ghost of a frown to skitter across his face. "Execute the infiltration again, Moros."

The computer twittered faintly as it connected through thousands of relays and waveforms, and a second later Moros said, "Connection is not possible at this time."

"What?"

"Connection isrefused," it said expressionlessly.

"Why? What's changed?" Blanchard demanded.

"I no longer have access. The receptor program is under an override."

"What override?" Blanchard took his feet off the bench and stood up, facing the black tower of the computer. "What the hell?"

"Hell does not compute," said Moros mildly. "It appears that the somatic centers of the system are at present in control. As long as that continues, I cannot access the system."

Blanchard cursed under his breath. He had learned that to curse aloud elicited a demand for explanation from Moros: he had already been faced with having to explain the etymology of several four-letter words to an entity with no conception of sex or defecation. "Is it aware of you?"

"There is no way to tell," Moros replied. Blanchard sighed. "Maybe it's just asleep, or something. What about the others?"

"They are accessible," Moros told him evenly. "Do you wish me to try?"

"Yeah, yeah, go ahead," Blanchard said, still thinking about the cyborg. If they could get that one, they could get every AI chip extant. AI was still fairly nascent, but there was enough of it to matter. As it was, Moros had a pretty comprehensive grasp of much of the computer world. 

And, therefore, so did Blanchard.

He smiled again, sitting down with lean grace, and regarded the black tower of his creation.

"You've got to work on your air resistance," said Henry seriously. "The sphere is fairly aerodynamic, but only if the surface is smooth. And you could use a little more sidespin."

"Should I use more slush, or just hard-packed powder?"

"Depends what you want to achieve," the Mustang explained. "If you're looking for a concussion missile, use an ice core with hard snow surrounding it, but if you'd like to drench your target in slush, you'll want to compact it very slightly and fire at close range."

"Right," said Justin Turner. "Thanks, Henry, I'll try these mods." The mechanic was leaning against Henry's side, listening attentively. "And hey, sorry about that one right in the grille. I was aiming for your headlight."

"No problem," said Henry. "Oh, and Justin?"

"Yeah?"

Almost too fast to register, the Mustang fired his engine and threw himself into reverse, executing a perfectly controlled skid that swung him through 360 degrees to finish on Justin's other side, throwing up great fans of snow and slush, and cut his engine. 

Justin blinked owlishly through the slush that covered him. 

"Never let your guard drop in a snow fight," Henry finished. "Not fast enough, Grasshopper. Come on, I'll give you a ride back to the house and you can go take a hot bath."

"Oh, man," said Justin, laughing, "you are incredible."

"The problem seems to be," said Chris, "that in order to get into your head we need to put you under anesthesia, which is going to let whatever it is take over."

"You can bring me out of it," said Kate quietly. "Use something that's quickly reversible. I'm aware of the danger now, which is going to be raising my adrenaline levels and my alertness, which is going to help me fight it off. Whatever it is."

"It doesn't look like we've got much of a choice." Chris sighed. "All right, you lot, out of the room, and give us some space."

They were in Kate's bedroom, where a small medical unit had already been set up to monitor the newcomer. Reluctantly, everyone else left, and Chris turned to Kate. 

"Fancy a shot of nitrous?"

"Why not," Kate shrugged, taking a seat on the bed. "I seem to be surrounded by muscle cars; I might try NOS induction myself."

"Ah, we don't use it in our engines," Chris informed her, "just in our operatives." She handed Kate the mask connected to the gas tanks, easing the valves open to create a mix of nitrous oxide and oxygen strong enough to induce anesthesia but oxygenated enough to keep Kate from cyanosis. "You've done this before."

"Many a time." Kate lay down on the bed, grimacing at the canned taste of the anesthetic. "And how, may I ask, did you become a surgeon?"

"I was bored. Relax, I know what I'm doing."

A few more minutes was all it took before Kate was fully under. Chris elbowed on the light over the bed, keeping her gloved hands sterile, and bent over Kate's exposed neck.

(_familiar dizziness, whirling dreams, the dissociation of reality and dream. this is all right. we have done this before. we know this......_

something is happening.

something is happeni.....)

Henry and Justin were almost back to the house when Henry's engine coughed and died, shuddering, as if he had stalled; Justin, worried, stared at the dash. None of the gages read anything out of the ordinary.

"Henry, what's wrong?"

The Mustang's silence was worse than any complaint. Justin cursed. "It's back, isn't it," he muttered. "Goddamn it, Henry, I don't know what to do, I....."

"....nothing you can do...." managed Henry. "...wait for it...to go away....."

"Fuck. Oh mighty fuck. Listen, man, let me go get Bonnie, I'll be right back..."

"No," said Henry, painfully. "Please. She's worried enough. I'll be all right..." He broke off, coughing. "I'll be okay. Really. Let me get you back to the house, and I'll get inside where it's warm."

"Damn, Henry, I can't believe you," Justin muttered. "What a stoic."

"No...." coughed the Mustang, "just realistic. Shut up and sit down."

Inside, the other AIs were in no better state. Henry parked himself by the space heater, shivering, and cut his engine. "Go get warm, Justin," he told the mechanic. "There's not much you can do for us, except try not to get pneumonia."

"That would be really annoying," Karr agreed. "Go, Justin."

"Right," said the mechanic, raising his hands in mock defeat. "Feel better, guys."

"What the hell is going on?" demanded Karr, once he'd left. "Henry, do you know any more about this than I do?"

"I wish," muttered Henry. "I feel like hell. Funny how we can experience all the negative sides of human experience and none of the positive."

"You think this is human experience?" asked Kitt tiredly.

"Jolly feels like it," Henry retorted, "haven't you ever got an echo of Michael when he gets the flu or a cold or something?"

"Michael doesn't _get_ sick," muttered Karr. "He's sensible, unlike Jack, who is forever running around without food or sleep in pursuit of heroism and women."

Kitt snorted. "You think Michael doesn't do that? You ought to've seen him back in the early days, when he was dating an average of three different girls a week. You're lucky, Henry, your partner's not so likely to throw over a mission every time you drive past a girl in a short skirt."

"Yes, well," Henry sighed, "you guys don't have to get echoes of cramps every month. Don't you say a word, Karr. It's not her fault."

"Would I be crass enough to remark on that?" Karr laughed. "She's bitched to me about it, too, you know. Damn, I have one hell of a headache."

"You don't have a head," Kitt reminded him. 

"Tell that to my CPU," Karr groaned. "Why don't we all just shut up and wait for this to be over?"

"Fascinating," Chris murmured under her breath. She had made an incision through the top layers of Kate's skin, revealing a circular grey metal surface stamped with the insignia of the Fairchild Foundation. With extreme care, she irrigated the wound with saline and dried it with a suction probe, then unscrewed the metal cap to reveal the familiar multi-pin connector end of a data port. The whole thing was straight out of dreadful science fiction movies.

But then, she thought, what is it that I do every day? I interface with an artificial intelligence so advanced that it has a sense of humor to rival my own and can do differential calculus with the same ease as breathing.

Sighing at the weirdness of the universe, Chris set aside the scalpel and began to suture the edges of the incision, leaving the port exposed. The flap of skin she had removed was, she realized, artificial, and this operation had been done before. There were minor scars ringing the port where previous sutures had held the edges of the skin down to the edges of the port. She disinfected the sutures and applied a thin film of antibiotic ointment to them, before replacing her instruments in the sterilizer tray and glancing at the clock. The whole operation had taken less than twenty minutes. 

She pulled off the rubber gloves, moving around to the head of the bed and taking Kate's pulse with steady fingers. Normal. Slow, as it would be, under the influence of the nitrous, but within normal limits. Excellent. Now to bring her out of it as quickly and safely as possible, so as to minimize the amount of time her mind was vulnerable to the outside influence. Whatever that influence might be.

She reached out to the gas tanks and turned off the valve to the NOS, leaving Kate breathing pure oxygen. Devon's daughter looked very young and very vulnerable, she thought absently, quite exquisitely beautiful, as always, but somehow otherworldly.

She waited: two, three minutes. Kate should be coming to. Four minutes. 

Five. Something was wrong.

Checking her pulse rate again, Chris found her still completely under. What the hell...?

The outside influence. It must be keeping her sedated. Somehow.

The melatonin levels? Something in Kate's brain was unbalanced. Damn. Chris reached out for the syringes she had laid out against such an emergency, drew up several ccs of adrenaline into the barrel, and shot it directly into the great muscle of Kate's shoulder. Almost immediately she jerked and gasped, her eyelids fluttering, and Chris began to breathe again.

"Jesus," she muttered. "Kate, you okay?"

"Yeah," Kate gasped. "What happened?"

"You weren't coming out of it. Did you....dream anything?"

Kate thought briefly. "I remember going under, you know, it felt like it always feels on laughing gas, and then....." She paused. "Yeah, there was something weird. It was as if something else had suddenly come into my mind. The outside influence. Whatever it is, it's not malignant. Just sort of curious."

"Yeah, well, that curiosity is playing hell with our friends in the garage," Justin interrupted, leaning against the doorframe. "You'd better get down there, Chris, Henry's had a relapse."

"Oh, fuck," said Chris. "I knew this would happen. Kate, you're stable; take some advil for the pain, and we can start downloading your specs. Justin, go get Bonnie and tell her our patient is ready for her. And if you see Michael tell him he's to stay in bed. Jesus, my head hurts." In a whirl of activity, she was gone, and Justin and Kate exchanged a look of mutual sympathy.

"Martin," said Moros quietly, "there was just a break in the access restriction of the system you're interested in."

"What? Why?"

"Not known. However, I have managed to extract more data from the system. Apparently it is an AI of similar sophistication to myself."

"I knew that," Blanchard spat. "What else?"

"It is aware of me."

"I want to meet them," said Kate suddenly, pausing with her hand on Justin's arm. "Please, Justin. I feel so bad.... I've inflicted so much pain on them, and I hardly even know their names."

Justin, looking down into her great dark eyes, had intended to tell her no; that their need to get into her head and find out just what was going on superseded the importance of her making the AIs' acquaintance, but he found himself quite unable to deny her request. She looked so very young, and so tired, and so fragile, that he had the strange compulsion to indulge and protect her in any way he could. She seemed ephemeral, almost evanescent, and he couldn't find it in him to say no. 

Bonnie did it for him. Coming up behind them where they stood in the foyer, the computer mech put a hand on their respective shoulders and jarred Justin out of his reverie. "Kate," she said, "they're not well, not right now, and we really do need to start looking at your databanks. You can meet them after we've downloaded what we need, by which time they'll probably have recovered."

Kate closed those great luminous plastic eyes for a long moment. "You're right," she said at length. "I just want to apologize."

"That's not necessary," Bonnie assured her, steering her toward the computer lab. "It's not your fault this outside influence keeps taking over. It's as much your fault as it would be your fault if you got the flu. Okay? Now relax. Everything is going to be all right."

Justin remained staring after them, like a man who's just been KO'd and has not yet fallen over. No girl had ever done that to him before. No girl, and no boy. Those eyes......

Christine arrived at the garage out of breath and still dressed in OR scrubs, which did not keep out quite as much of the cold as she'd have wished; however, the ambient temperature inside was as high as the heaters could go, and she soon found herself stripped down to tank top and scrub pants, sweating. The first glance she'd got inside the garage twisted cold fingers in her heartstrings; but with practice had come a sort of bedside poker face, and she assumed her air of cool competence and assurance with the ease of putting on a coat. Thousands of times she had had to deal with her friends and her lover in pain and grief; thousands of times she had had to be the strength against which they could lean, and she had only been mildly surprised to find that it didn't get easier with practice. It just became second nature.

She went first to Karr, parked a little distance from the others, and knelt in front of his black prow, running gentle fingers along the curving line of the scanner track and the headlight covers. He roused a little at her touch, whispered her name.

"Hey, love," she murmured. "How are you feeling?"

"Pretty bad," Karr admitted. "I don't know how much more of this I can take."

"I know," Chris sighed, rubbing the rock-hard contours of his bodywork, gently, in circles. "It's not going to be for much longer, sweet. Kate's out of the anesthetic, and her mind's her own again. We're doing the memory dump now. In a couple of hours Bonnie should have some concrete data for us."

"Thank you," murmured Karr, and the low tones of his voice held real gratitude. "I love you, Chris."

"I love you too," she told him, resting her forehead against his warm metal for a long moment. When she raised her head she found herself more than a little dizzy, and wondered how long it had been since she'd slept, and then told herself not to wonder that any more, because it would only depress the hell out of her. She sat back on her heels.

"Henry needs you," Karr whispered. "He's the worst off."

"Will you be all right?"

"Eventually."

With a last caress, Chris rose and went to Henry, who was visibly shivering despite his proximity to the heaters. She bit her lip in sympathy at the sight of her partner's dark red form quivering silently, and bent over him, reaching out with tentative fingers to touch his hood. "Henry, babe, can you hear me?"

There was silence for a few moments, before she heard his faint reply. "Chris?"

"I'm here," she assured him, vaguely aware of the tears that threatened to blur her vision. She had never seen him this bad, not in all the years they'd worked together. Moving swiftly, she opened his driver's side door and slid inside, wrapping her arms gently around his wheel, fingers stroking the perceptor set on the top of the steering column. "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry about this...."

"Not your fault," Henry managed. "S...sorry to be such a damn nuisance...."

"You are nothing of the kind," she told him firmly. "It is not your fault you're ill, and I won't have you thinking you're bringing me down. When I find out who's been doing this to you, I will visit all this pain on their pointy heads tenfold. Okay?"

"Okay," he said, softly, and she thought his voice held less pain. 

"All right then. Try to relax, honey, I'm here, I'll do anything I can to make you better."

He didn't reply, but in the back of her mind the lightly blocked neurolink pulsed a little, with warmth and gratitude and love, and she sent a wave of her own strength over the link to him. Already, as Kate's body rid itself of all vestiges of the anesthetic, she could feel an improvement in the AI's condition. This would not be for much longer. 

A little voice in her head added, _It can't be for much longer. This is destroying us all._

It wasn't long before she found herself half-dreaming, leaning on Henry's wheel with the utter boneless flexibility of exhaustion. Something big and black was looming over her, something alight with tiny red and green stars that flickered in the patterns of migraine. She had a sudden sensation of the sea, deep and green and cold, and full of things that had no eyes in the darkness. Greek gods gamboled along the seafloor, visible in the dark only through their lambent beauty.

She knew delirium when she felt it, and she realized with the waking part of her mind that this was Henry's delirium, product not of somatic fever but deranged electrical signals, scrambling and twisting the lightning patterns of his thoughts. He had never been this ill before, she thought absently. I was right; it is destroying us.

But the dancing lights began to recede, slowly, pulsing like madness behind her eyes as they went, and she felt within herself Henry's mind beginning to recover. Dimly she was aware of someone's hand on her shoulder, someone speaking her name, light stabbing her eyes. This isn't right. I should be working, I should be doing something to help them, help Henry, he's so ill....

Cool fingers on her hot face. She felt herself lifted, carried; the rocking rhythm of someone's walk sent bursts of reddish light off behind her eyes, someone's heart thundered heavily against her ear. Voices came and went around her. Bonnie's voice, and someone else's. Someone's fingers found her wrist, pressed gently, let go, and she was lowered onto something soft, and kept sinking down into billowy clouds of nothing.

"This is the last damn thing we need," Michael said, looking down at Christine's curled body in the bed. "What next? Aliens land on the roof and kidnap Bonnie?"

"She's all right," Bonnie said tiredly, "just exhausted, and getting echoes of Henry through the link. Let her sleep. And you, hero, should be resting."

"I'm fine," Michael snapped irritably. "Nothing is wrong with _me_. Unlike everyone else. Have you finished with Kate's brain yet?"

"Almost," Bonnie said, turning away from the cot they'd laid Chris on to the banks of computer equipment set up on the workbenches. "It's amazing how similar her circuitry is to Kitt's."

"And what is the weak link?" Devon inquired. "What is enabling this outside force to take over her mind?"

"That I haven't isolated yet," replied Bonnie. "I think it's something to do with how she regulates external access, but I've never dealt with an AI this enmeshed with a human brain. The parts of her that are electronic are fairly straightforward, in terms of bubble chips and neural nets, but the interface with the actual grey matter is beyond me. However, I've managed to find out the parts of the brain that are active during her sleep phases." She turned the monitor towards Devon. On it was a rotating schematic of Kate's brain, with the electronic sectors shown in a grid format. Parts of the electronic sectors were lit up in green.

"I've had to sedate her again, which is why the AIs got a longer dose of it this past time, but she's coming out of it now. Look."

On the screen, three electronic areas that had been green now began to flicker and fade. Devon noted vaguely that much of the implantation had been in the frontal lobes, but there was a small area of circuitry in the cerebellum, in the part of the brain which regulated basic life signs like breathing and heartbeat. This had been glowing most strongly. It was now almost completely faded; as the last flickers of green disappeared, Kate, on the bed, blinked and opened her eyes. Devon looked at Bonnie.

"Now it's just a matter of finding out exactly what those areas do, and why they are active during unconsciousness. If we can do that, we'll be able to find out why they're vulnerable to the outside influence."

"Do you think the influence is always present?" Devon wondered aloud.

"I was wondering that myself. If it isn't, that sort of suggests that whatever it is is doing this on purpose. That it's sentient."


End file.
